By STEPHEN HOLDEN

March 20, 2017

Suzanne Vega was 15 when she discovered the Southern Gothic writer Carson McCullers and was captivated by what she describes as her “endearing combination of fragility and toughness, and her unconditional love for humanity and compassion for the underdog.”

Because of the author’s first name, it wasn’t until the late 1970s that Ms. Vega, the New York singer-songwriter best known for hits like “Luka” and “Tom’s Diner,” discovered that McCullers, who died in 1967 at the age of 50, was a woman.

Pungent biographical songs about McCullers make up a third of the repertoire in Ms. Vega’s debut engagement at Café Carlyle, where she is appearing through Saturday. Those songs, with music by Duncan Sheik and Michael Jefry Stevens, come from Ms. Vega’s recent album, “Lover, Beloved: Songs From an Evening With Carson McCullers,” a music-theater work in progress that will have its third incarnation at the Alley Theater in Houston in 2018 before coming to New York. Ms. Vega will play McCullers, to whom she bears a marked physical resemblance. The show was inspired partly by “The Belle of Amherst,” William Luce’s play, in which Julie Harris originated the role of Emily Dickinson, and Terrence McNally’s 1995 play, “Master Class.”

Asked about inhabiting her character, Ms. Vega said, “My dream is that some young transgender actor will take the role one day.”

In the album’s most audacious song, “Harper Lee,” Ms. Vega, speaking in McCullers’s voice, offers the kind of scathing assessments of other literary giants in the hypercompetitive literary world that Norman Mailer used to deliver like holy pronouncements. “Virginia Woolf, she leaves me cold,” she begins. “I have more to say than Hemingway,” she continues. When she gets to Lee, author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” she boasts, “She only wrote that one book! I’ve written more than three.” She accuses Truman Capote of plagiarizing her “cadences.” “As for F. Scott, my Sad Café is greater than his Gatsby,” she proclaims.

The suite of songs from the album fits comfortably in the Carlyle show, a retrospective of Ms. Vega’s career, which spans more than three decades. Hallmarks of Ms. Vega’s songwriting and performing include a cleareyed understatement, acute observational detail wrapped in an aura of cool self-possession, and concise circular melodies.

Ms. Vega is the antithesis of a drama queen, conveying the objectivity of a journalist even when speaking in the voice of an abused child, like the first-person narrator of “Luka,” making excuses for his bruises and quietly requesting, “Just don’t ask me how I am.”

That journalist’s eye coincides with a cautious hauteur that reflects her admiration for female adventurers. At the Carlyle, Ms. Vega dons a top hat to sing her tribute to Marlene Dietrich, a poster of whom inspires the narrator to stand up to a boyfriend and not “give away the goods too soon.”

The equivalent of Dietrich on “Lover, Beloved” is the Swiss writer, photographer and journalist Annemarie Schwarzenbach, an androgynous, hard-living femme fatale with whom McCullers fell madly (and unrequitedly) in love.

For all her identification with McCullers, Ms. Vega is hardly besotted. “I think she has a place in the pantheon of writers, but I wouldn’t say she’s my favorite,” she explained. “She was so fragile and required so much care from her mother, who had a lot invested in her being a genius. But she was very much an alcoholic. She drank and smoked and was half-paralyzed by the time she was 30. But she had a will to survive and thrive and write. I love her for her vision.”

That vision is perhaps best summarized in Ms. Vega’s song “Carson’s Last Supper,” in which she declares:

The love of my life Is humanity.The rich and the poorAll come togetherFeeding the soul.